Over the recent years, distilleries have been starting to pop up across the country, it reminds me almost of the winery and brewery boom that occured in the late 70's.

A friend of mine, after over a year of preparation and red tape, has recently opened up his own distillery here in the Pacific Northwest (Woodinville to be specific), and his first product is what I feel is an excellent gin.

To celebrate this new gin, I thought I'd try to create a cocktail for it. The name of the gin is "Voyager", which I suppose unfortunately I've already used for a cocktail name. The label of the gin includes a bold image of a Clipper Ship, so Marc (the distiller) suggested that we call the drink "Clipper Ship".

With such a seafaring motif, I figured that the drink had to include lime juice, which meant the next ingredient had to be some form of sweetener. I decided to go with St-Germain, because it's subtleness wouldn't overpower the gin, but it would also add some interesting complexity. But the drink still needed something else, mostly because this choice of ingredients would be fairly obvious, and I wanted something that would at least stand a chance of being an original creation. Fortunately Pacific Distillery provided the answer to this dillema. The second product which they plan on producing is absinthe, so I added just a dash of a good quality absinthe to round things out. Thankfully this provided a wonderful extra character to the drink, and I thus I christened it the "Clipper Ship" cocktail!